Quotes by Writers - Page 95

So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs.
H.G.Wells
I wouldn’t joke if you weren’t always patching me up,” Davin retorted. He looked at Chad again. “You must have noticed, right? It’s kind of cute, actually.” Though my heart fluttered, I tried to shoot him a warning glare. He ignored me. “I like to call her Doctor Fisher.
J.M. Richards
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon - that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.Neo: What truth?Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
The Wachowski Brothers
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Aldous Huxley
The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.
H.G.Wells
The chances of anything man-like on Mars are a million to one
H.G.Wells
One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a "generator of ideas" — for we were running out of them — those works of fantastic literature, that popular genre (especially in the States), called, by a persistent misconception, "science fiction." He had not read such books before; he was annoyed — indignant, even — expecting variety, finding monotony. "They have everything except fantasy," he said. Indeed, a mistake. The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, clichés, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made "wonderful" so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life. If there is progress in a culture, the progress is above all conceptual, but literature, the science-fiction variety in particular, has nothing to do with that.
Stanisław Lem
Technology won’t protect you from being attacked for fresh water. A badass blade will. Back in Eden where I grew up, the closest thing to knifework I’d experienced was cutting up a loaf of warm bread. Last night, I’d gutted a wild prairie chicken after scaling a rock face to find its nest and slit its throat. What a difference a year makes.
Georgia Clark
I catch movement from the corner of my eye. A tell slender boy stands near us, just a few feet away. Adrenaline bangs through my system. I shove Abel behind me and whip my knife from where I’d hidden it in my boot. “Who the hell are you?
Georgia Clark
A mix of revenge, sadness and anger funnels into a decision that’s so simple and neat, it could fit in my pocket. I will help Kudzu destroy Aevum. Just like Magnus destroyed my mother.
Georgia Clark
My fingers find his. They are warm, pulsing with genetically altered blue blood, powered by mirror matter.
Georgia Clark
I focus all my energy into become a faster, stronger, and better version of myself.
Georgia Clark
We’re a nonviolent collective working to undermine the Trust and free the Badlands. Once the Trust is exposed as lying and corrupt, we believe Edenites will do the right thing. Open the borders. Save the Badlands.” Ling lowers her voice with deliberate control. “Kudzu is going to destroy something called Aevum.
Georgia Clark
I was never able to conquer the distance between persons. An animal is fixed to its here-and-now by the senses, but man manages to detach himself, to remember, to sympathize with others, to visualize their states of mind and feelings: this, fortunately, is not true. In such attempts at pseudo merging and transferral we are only able, imperfectly, darkly, to visualize ourselves. What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear, and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms, and the agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals. If from every unfortunate, from every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance ofthe generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling.We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf.
Stanisław Lem
Every science fiction is a reading of the period that produced it.
Andrew Durbin
Thus and thus is the world. Seeing the depth, we shall see also the height, and praise both.
Olaf Stapledon
I have no objection to the expression of political opinions in SF if they are an integral part of the story structure. I don't at all appreciate their intrusion for the purpose of converting a story into a political tract, because I consider that intellectually insulting.
Roger Zelazny
He had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.
Aldous Huxley
Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.
H.G.Wells
I am the scent that he will follow always, hunting for God.
Olaf Stapledon
This new brand of mastery, of dominance that demanded she bare her soul, not just surrender her body, gave him a terrible power over her.
Renee Rose
What an optimistic animal man is!" said Rumfoord rosily. "Imagine expecting the species to last for ten million more years - as though people were as well-developed as turtles!" He shrugged. "Well - who knows - maybe human beings will last that long, just on the basis of pure cussedness. What's your guess?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present movement. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.
H.G.Wells
We owe our liberation to chemistry," he went on. "For all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells. Seeing me, you actually experience a disturbance in the sodium-potassium equilibrium across your neuron membranes. So all we have todo is send a few well-chosen molecules down into those cortical mitochondria, activate the right neurohumoral-synaptic transmission effector sites, and your fondest dreams come true. But you knowall this," he concluded, subdued.
Stanisław Lem
So I think that a protest,' she went on, 'like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protestor for the protestor.'She saw I was about to interrupt so said, 'One more minute. Let me explain. Of course one hopes and plans for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn't be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protestor it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can call it hokum if you wish, but for the protestor, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide.
Eugene Lim
I assert nothing, I content myself with believing that more is possible than people think.
Voltaire
Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then...Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another and against these moon people. It will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while if I tell my secret, this planet to it's deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead. Other things are doubtful, but this is certain...It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again-in a thousand years' time.
H.G.Wells
Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I became a so-called science fiction writer when someone decreed that I was a science fiction writer. I did not want to be classified as one, so I wondered in what way I'd offended that I would not get credit for being a serious writer. I decided that it was because I wrote about technology, and most fine American writers know nothing about technology. I got classified as a science fiction writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady, New York. My first book, Player Piano, was about Schenectady. There are huge factories in Schenectady and nothing else. I and my associates were engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. And when I wrote about the General Electric Company and Schenectady, it seemed a fantasy of the future to critics who had never seen the place.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.
Stanisław Lem
Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.
Aldous Huxley
I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Rutger Hauer
We walk in dark places no others will enter. We stand on the bridge and no one may pass. We live for the One. We die for the One. -- the Ranger oath
J. Michael Straczynski
Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.
Samuel Johnson
Quand celui à qui l'on parle ne comprend pas et celui qui parle ne se comprend pas, c'est de la métaphysiqueWhen he to whom a person speaks does not understand, and he who speaks does not understand himself, that is metaphysics.
Voltaire
Nature is never so admired as when she is understood.
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Alice leaned first one way and then the other, down the line of children. She said, Is everybody understanding this?"One child said, "The misuse of power is the root of all evil?"Alice said, "Well...."Another child said, "There is no justice on the earth?"Alice said, "Well..."Another child said, "We are all alone in the world?"Alice said, "Well..."Another child said, "The greatest depth of our loss is the beginning of true freedom?"Alice said, "Well..."Another child said, "The disposal of human waste is the responsibility of the brokenhearted?"These were all phrases Alice had put on the chalkboard after other field trips. It occurred to Alice, hearing these phrases now, that she might have attempted to do too much with a class of fourth graders. She was willing to admit to some excesses.Alice said, "Just listen.
Lewis Nordan
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.
Voltaire
I guess he had listened to more beefs and more problems from more people than any of us. A guy that'll really listen to you, listen and care about what you're saying, is something rare.
S.E. Hinton
Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency;
Frederick Douglass
We are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act.
Abigail Adams
It is not easy in this world for one person to understand the next one.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The great minds, which from time to time have existed in this world, were like doors thrown wide to understanding. I don't mean just their brilliance or philosophy or even psychology. I mean that the spoken words that have endured are those uttered by men who understood with their hearts.No one on earth understands everything; that all-comprehensive function belongs to God alone. But we all try to understand a little. Most of us realize that too late. We look back and think: If only I'd tried to understand. Many failures in human relationships derive from this common failure.Watching the birds flock to discuss their travels among the brilliant leaves, listening to the slow turning of the earth upon her axis, meditating on Nature herself, never uncertain no matter how uncertain her manifestations may be, I think of the instinct that sends the birds from one locality to another, of the lengthening shadows as we face toward autumn, and of the marvelous system that encourages the leaf to fall and nurture the soil. In the single flame of October it begins the lullaby that will put the roots of grass and flowers to sleep. This system, in the four seasons of my little world, will cover the ground with silent snow, and at a later date will shout that spring is coming and awaken sleepers to new life.The sun in his glory, the moon in her phases, the stars in their courses, all these are part of the system; and Nature, turning the wheel of the seasons, understands what she must accomplish.Each in our own way, I suppose, we try to understand what we must accomplish. Perhaps the most important thing of all is the attempt to understand others.
Faith Baldwin
What we understand and love understands and loves us also.
Robert Walser
I remember seeing this video for the first time in college - miserable, half-drunk on Keystone Light, a Camel Light smoldering in my mouth, about to desperately tap-dance my way through another social interaction - and saying out loud: "I fucking *get* you, Bee Girl.
Dave Holmes
To demand that the intelligence abstain from judging mutilates its faculty of understanding.It is in the value judgment that understanding culminates.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Life was all about consequences
Liane Moriarty
But if we are to remain a great empire, we must have a greater understanding of the hearts and minds of others.
Libba Bray
If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.
Elbert Hubbard
To be understood is to prostitute oneself
Fernando Pessoa
Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!
H.P. Lovecraft
Behind everyday reality, there is a deeper reality so cruel that it condemns to death those who crime is no greater than the pursuit of their own curiosity.("Shem-El-Nessim: An Inspiration In Perfume")
Chris Bell
Goodreads.com is actually about fiction not dreading goo. But I have a profile there, anyway...
Michael A. Arnzen
Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!
H.P. Lovecraft
One of the symptoms of having a broken-heart is the fact that even ghosts will give up on the hope of scaring you as you have already lived through your worst fear.
Faraaz Kazi
I stumble across the sea of tarmac, finding pavement, concealment and a brick wall. Palms brace against the scrubby surface. My stomach churns and then bubbles over, burning my throat as acrid yellow acid spills from my lips in frothy discomposure. It splatters the pavement like a spray of blood.
Rebecca Clare Smith
Night had come and eaten everything.
Rebecca Ethington
Our lives are defined by fear from the very time we are born to the time we bid adieu to this material world.
Faraaz Kazi